The Love and Terror of Nick Cave

For four decades, Nick Cave has been at the edge of music, putting his spin on everything from punk rock to lovesick ballads—much of it with his band the Bad Seeds—assembling a body of work that is astonishing for its range, power, and feeling. Then unspeakable tragedy and grief had their way with him, and his music had to change yet again

Nick Cave sits in a Sydney hotel room, his chair facing the floor-to-ceiling windows, the city bathed in summer sun beyond and below. “Look,” he continues, patiently choosing his words, “not to just keep going on about this, but the whole grief thing, there's nothing good about it whatsoever. People will tell you other things, but it's like a fucking disease. A contagion that not only affects you but everybody around you. And it's cunning. And you can feel good and you can be getting on with things, and then it just comes up and sort of punches you in the back of the head and you're down and you're out for the count for a while. I don't just mean psychologically, I mean physically too. Grief and illness and tiredness feed off each other in a kind of feeding frenzy.”

It is January 2017. Eighteen months ago, Nick Cave's 15-year-old son Arthur fell from a cliff near Brighton, the town on the south coast of England where Cave has lived since 2002 with his wife Susie, Arthur, and Earl, Arthur's twin brother. (Cave also has two sons, Jethro and Luke, both in their mid-20s, from earlier relationships.) After it happened, Cave obeyed some kind of instinct that told him he had to keep working. He relates a conversation with Warren Ellis, who for several years has been his closest musical collaborator. “I said to Warren a week after Arthur died: It just goes on, you know. I didn't even know what I was talking about. I was just, like: We continue doing whatever we were doing. We continue to do it.” Partly, he suggests, out of “some sort of bizarre responsibility” to those around him. But also because he could see no other option. “It was not like an act of courage or anything, it was just that I didn't know what the fuck else to be doing. All I knew is that what I do is work, and that kind of continues. I think I knew, fundamentally, that if I lay down, I would never get up again.”

So in the months that followed, Cave and his group the Bad Seeds completed a new album, Skeleton Tree—a somber masterpiece that seemed to ooze the circumstance of its creation—and then he and Ellis returned to the studio to compose six scores, including those for Hell or High Water and the National Geographic television series Mars. “Working very much as a kind of therapeutic activity, to be honest,” he says. But until this month Cave hasn't performed in front of an audience. Nor has he sat down like this to talk.

He didn't know what to expect from this tour, back to Australia, the country of his birth. He wondered whether things would be different, and how these new songs would sit next to older ones, many of those more directly forceful and visceral. And it has been different, in a way that seems to have slightly taken him aback. “You know, the audience has been hugely helpful,” he says. “And I find it difficult to articulate this to them, onstage, but, and maybe don't put this in, I would just want to thank them for this. Because for me it's, like, this is not the way it should be. I've always felt as a performer a sort of combativeness. You know, the finger would come out and I would be here I am and this is fucking it and stand there and take it. And it was a very one-way kind of experience for me.… I come from a different school of frontmen. Full-on attack. It's an attack on your audience of some sort. It's just the way it's always been.” That has changed. “Even though the finger comes out, it doesn't feel like that in the same ways it used to feel. It feels much more that there's something coming back.… Something different has been happening with the audience—a kind of dynamic, emotional exchange—that is quite beautiful. There's just some kind of communal feeling. Maybe this is what it's like to be in Coldplay or something.”

He had worried that he would come away to Australia, and get sick. “The opposite has happened, really,” he says. “It's like the best thing you can do.” What he says next is clearly doused in a certain wryness, but I think he means it, too: “That's my advice if anything terrible ever happens to you: Form a band and go on tour.”

A storyteller as fine as Nick Cave can't help but be a little sensitive to the narratives he finds himself placed in, and in recent years he has noticed a pattern emerge. “You know: hell-raiser cleans up, and now lives a comfortable life in a seaside town type of thing. This may be true, but there's something about that story that I kind of bristle against.”

That latter-day Nick Cave story replaced an earlier version, one in which it was already clear that Cave was creating a body of work that was of a different kind and worth than most of his peers, but when a cleaned-up, comfortable-life, seaside-town next act still seemed somewhat improbable. I wrote one of those stories myself, a quarter of a century ago, spending a couple of days around him and the Bad Seeds on tour in Athens, Greece. I found him happy, or at least willing, to talk through the path that had led him here: starting out in a one-street Australian town to a librarian mother and an English-literature-teacher father who read him the first chapter of Lolita when he was young to show him how wonderful the words were. The adolescent Cave competed with, and tried to shock, his father—“I would say my relationship with my father fueled a lot of my innate offensiveness I had at the time”—a competition that was abruptly curtailed, never to be resolved, by his father's death in a car accident when Cave was 21. His school group, the Boys Next Door, mutated into the Birthday Party; in 1980 the band moved to London where their sound, a thrilling vitriolic whirlwind, a kind of hectic, violent, and surreal assault that was part punk snarl, part Stooges abandon, and part something much weirder and swampier, was both embraced and rejected. They responded in kind. “There was a point,” he'd observed to me, “where we changed from a group of drunks who just went onstage and played with a ‘fuck you’ attitude…to a group who very much took to insulting the audience.” When the Birthday Party fell apart in 1983, few people expected too much of Cave. Even setting aside all the other things he has done since—the books, the film scripts, the lectures, the soundtracks—there were only fleeting signs of the commanding, visionary, idiosyncratic, and masterful songwriter and singer he would become, one rooted in, and leaching from, every kind of musical tradition as he pushed forward to find new ways of saying new things to say. In my notes from 25 years ago I put it like this: The consensus was that he was a vaguely psychotic drunken fucked-up drug addict, deceiving himself with vain delusions of glory.

“Songwriting is an immensely positive act, nothing to do with sadness or depression, no matter what you're writing about.”

Some of which may have been true, except that he soon started showing an ambition and an ability that belied all that. A smattering of early high points—“From Her to Eternity,” “Tupelo,” and the staggering “The Mercy Seat”—remain in the Bad Seeds' set today. He also wrote a dense, quasi-biblical novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel, a fully realized feat of obsessive imagination that showed no signs of being a dilettante rock star's folly. He told me in Athens that it was the one thing he wished his father could have seen.

Cave had a fairly fearsome reputation in those days, especially when it came to journalists, but while he hadn't let go of the rhetoric—I watched him matter-of-factly inform a group of five Greek journalists that rock criticism is “a dog's job”—one-on-one he was frank and smart and almost determinedly candid, and often pretty funny too. But almost everything he said, however honest or revealing, seemed to come with the kind of resignation of someone who had no real expectation that he would really be heard or understood. And consequently I got the sense that I was still, at best, a ridiculous distraction to be tolerated. One night I ate with him and the Bad Seeds at an Athens restaurant, a fairly long and drunken evening. Eventually, perplexed and exasperated by the way I continued to take notes, he began dictating to me what I should write:

“…and I looked into his face and saw a world of true sadness that, being a mere journalist, I don't have the power to express. But it was there, believe me. A sadness from every pore. The Sad Man. Man of Sadness. And he raved on, and I saw that his tears were not only for himself, but for everyone. Especially me. And he put down his glass and wept openly, unashamedly, and with great…greatness. And then he belched. The saddest belch. A belch so full of sadness that I too wept, and cannot write anymore.…”

At that point, he stopped dictating.

“There you go, mate. Wrote the fucking thing for you. Go home now.”

In the two weeks before his son's death, Cave had been improvising and writing new songs with Warren Ellis. The plan had been to later rework those songs, and record newer ones, in a studio in Paris, and in the spirit of it just goes on they went ahead. It was a disaster. “That was just so fucked-up and such a stupid thing to be doing,” says Cave. “I was in absolutely no condition to be outside the house, or around other people. And to me everything sounded terrible. I'd written some new songs and I would get halfway through playing the song and say, ‘Oh, this is fucking bullshit…,’ and abandon it.”

There had also been a plan to shoot a film of the band making their new album, a film that would be shown around the world the day before the album's release. And so, one further attempt at it just goes on, Cave asked the filmmaker Andrew Dominik to do just that. Dominik is best known as the director of movies like Chopper and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (for which Cave and Ellis wrote the score), but he and Cave share a much longer history. Their paths first intersected, as Dominik has put it, “at the drug dealers' in 1986,” and they were linked through the inspiration for one of Cave's finest early songs, “Deanna,” an ex-girlfriend of Cave's who later had a child with Dominik. (Back in Athens, when I asked Cave about the song, he told me that Deanna liked it but “she didn't like the line, which is my favorite line, I cum a death's-head in your frock.”) Dominik eventually told Cave he would shoot the film “provided we address the Arthur situation.” Cave agreed. “On the condition,” he says, “I could edit anything out I didn't like.”

The film that resulted, One More Time with Feeling, while still purportedly a document of an album's creation, is an incredible portrayal of grief, and of the real ways in which tragedy shapes and bends the world that surrounds it and must continue after it. When Cave first saw the film, he was horrified.

“I was angry about it,” he says. “I could see from an aesthetic point of view it was an extremely accomplished and beautiful piece of work, but there were aspects of it that grated against what I am, as a person. Maybe it's an old-school Australian thing, you know, a queasiness around public displays of emotion.… The film showed a very vulnerable person in a desperate situation and it was something that I thought that I would be embarrassed about for the rest of my life.” He also had a very specific concern: “I was worried that it would do a terrible disservice to my son, mostly. That it would appear exploitative.”

Lined up against these fears and concerns, one thing gave him and his wife a sense that there might be something of worth here, even if it was difficult for them to see or appreciate. “I was extremely moved by Susie in the film,” he says. “There was something so raw and honest about it. An excruciating reluctance to be there in front of the camera but an openheartedness too. A terrible need. And she felt the same way—she loved me but hated herself in the film.” Ultimately, Cave didn't ask for any cuts.

“We had to just let it go,” he says. “Who were we to judge?”

Cave's view of the film didn't change until it had what was intended as a one-day-only release. His people told him about the online reaction and made him sit down and read some of the comments. “It really was extremely moving,” he says. “The film seemed to give people an opportunity to open up about their own experiences.” Wanting to discover what others were seeing, he rented a cinema in Brighton the following afternoon and watched the film again, this time in 3-D, with Ellis, just the two of them in an empty cinema. “And saw the film much more for what it was,” he says. “And that it was actually something that Andrew had done that was beyond…”

Cave pauses, and it is the one time in our conversations when his voice breaks. “Sorry, I get quite emotional talking about this,” he says, and then he continues.

“…that Andrew had an agenda that was beyond anyone's expectations, and that it actually was a gift, to me and Susie, but most importantly, to Arthur. It gave Arthur's absence, his silence, a voice. This shifted something hugely in me. I mean, Susie and I were like birds trapped in an oil slick. We were incapable of moving. And this film had a freeing sort of effect on us. So the film has become really important to me, because of the kind of community that's arisen around the film. The potential it has had as a force of healing has been extraordinary for me and Susie, but for other people too. This was Andrew's astonishing gift. It was completely unexpected.”

One further extraordinary fact about the songs on Skeleton Tree, which were widely assumed to have been written in the wake of, and in response to, calamity, is that nearly all of them were based around those sketches and improvisations and lyrics that were recorded before Arthur's death—including those that seemed to allude directly to what had happened. “I don't know—it's kind of too spooky to think about it really,” says Ellis. “You think about stuff like that, I'm not sure it does you any good.”

Understandably, Cave is not inclined to read too much into these things, but he acknowledges them. He asked his wife to listen to “I Need You,” which sounds like a forlorn howl of anguish at what has taken place, and which was actually the final song he and Ellis worked on before Arthur's death. “Because there's a lot of lines in it that are quite...I don't know,” he says. “You know, the great thing about these songs for me is I can register their emotional impact because they don't even feel like they're my songs. They feel like they're something that just kind of occurred.”

The way these new Nick Cave shows work doesn't really make sense in theory. He comes onstage and begins with three of the most aching moments from Skeleton Tree; the pulsing washes of music that carry them are so desolate and stark that they're almost not songs at all but something much more fragile. You can feel a sense in the room that something mesmerizing is happening, but it's also hard to imagine where he can go from here. Maybe there's some scope for songs from those Bad Seeds records where beauty and space and melody come to the fore, like “The Ship Song” from 1990's serene The Good Son, or “Into My Arms” from 1997's masterful song cycle of heartbroken piano balladry The Boatman's Call, or “Higgs Boson Blues” and “Jubilee Street” from 2013's Push the Sky Away, a triumphant breakthrough into a whole new kind of hypnotic, fractured, meditative songwriting. But what about the other songs, the ones where the anger or disdain or sarcasm or malevolence or aggression dominates, the ones that have traditionally been performed by what Cave will describe to me, somewhat wryly, as the “deranged preacher”? How can that guy possibly turn up now?

But somehow he does, and somehow it fits right in. Even a song like the scabrous “motherfucker”-strewn all-out assault of “Stagger Lee,” from 1996's Murder Ballads, doesn't seem jarring. Some artists evolve in a way that leaves their past far behind them, but though Cave has kept changing, it's never been in any one direction (not that long ago he made some of the most direct, ribald, and propulsive music of his career with the two Grinderman albums), as though he's been trying out lots of different routes—loud, quiet, angry, tender, obscene, manic, gentle, direct, opaque, and on and on—to the same kind of intense poetic truths. What you hear when you hear these songs together is how they share the same mission.

Even so, he's one of the most unusual arena performers you'll ever see. Especially during the more agitated songs when he comes to the front of the stage, Cave performs almost entirely to the 50 or so people closest to him, most of whom reach at him with their arms and claw at his legs whenever he allows them the opportunity. Cave will later tell me that there's a banal, practical aspect to this—his eyesight isn't so good, so he can't see much detail beyond the first few rows. But there's something else too. “There's an energy I'm getting out of the people up front,” he explains. “A kind of very immediate validation for what you're doing. There's all sorts of things going on—there's love, and terror…I don't know.” From the way he says this, it's clear the second emotion is at least as useful as the first.

Although almost every frame and every sound in One More Time with Feeling seems to be in some sense about Arthur Cave's death, and although its last shot is of the clifftop, sea beyond it, where his life ended, followed by the sound of Arthur and Earl singing over the credits—a song they wrote the music for with their father called “Deep Water”—the film never directly addresses what has happened. If you didn't already know, all you'd initially realize is that the people on-screen are reeling in the wake of a monumental but unspecified trauma. Seventy-seven minutes pass before Arthur's name is spoken aloud.

To me, this only adds to the film's dignity and power and honesty. But others seem to have felt differently, even implying that an obvious connection between the details of Nick Cave's life and this tragedy has been buried or sidestepped. Here is an excerpt from the New York Times review of the movie:

Even after the son's name is mentioned, the drug-related circumstances of his death are not. Nor is the fact that Mr. Cave was once addicted to heroin.

And here is the review from Variety, where the same kind of logic, to me an offensively wrongheaded one, is made more explicit:

[T]here's something arguably cagey and protective about the way the basic facts of what happened are left out of the movie. We never learn how Arthur died: High on an overly hefty dose of LSD (and marijuana as well), he reportedly “freaked out” before falling off a cliff in Brighton, England, near their home. The movie achieves a quality of poetic loss by leaving out these details, and by never showing us a picture of Arthur. But given that Cave has admitted to his own intense battle with drug abuse (he is now clean), something seems amiss in his never remotely confronting the issue of whether he feels in any way responsible for the death of Arthur.

A week or so after the end of the Australian tour, I send Cave an e-mail with links to these reviews, asking for his thoughts. After he has noted, “I don't want to give too much oxygen to the matter of responsibility because it raises a point that only someone who knows nothing about parenting, drug-taking or bereavement would suggest,” he replies like this:

“Most of the time, Susie and I try to stay clear-eyed about the whole thing, that it was a terrible, senseless, tragic accident, that could happen to any high-spirited, curious young man. We definitely don't attach any sense of morality to it. But grief has a way of turning you against yourself and you can find yourself indulging in all sorts of irrational and self-destructive thoughts—self-pity, self-blame—because they form a direct connection to the small but present part of you that just wants to die. But we are vigilant with each other about this sort of thinking, I watch out for Susie and she watches out for me, because even though we lost Arthur we are still parents, and as parents, we still have our work to do. I have to say that our family was and remains a very loud, lively happy place. Things are softer now with Arthur gone, because he was just so completely vibrant, but we remain extremely close, and it's that closeness that's pretty much made it possible to get up and go on tour and all the rest of it.”

Not that it should make a difference in pushing back at the noxious implications of those reviews, but perhaps it's somehow useful to relay some of the real details that came out during Arthur Cave's inquest. That afternoon, he and a friend met at a local windmill to take LSD for the first time. The friend had Googled the effects the previous evening. By the windmill, they debated whether to even go ahead. But they did. As the trip went bad, the two of them became separated. At one point, Arthur texted another friend. “Where am I?” he asked. Later, he appears to have been walking home along the coastline. People in nearby traffic saw him staggering close to the cliff's edge, and then disappear from sight.

In the world in which Cave's early career took place, the alternative music and art scenes of London and Berlin in the 1980s, the interest in God, and in biblical imagery and narratives, that showed itself in many of his songs and his first novel was unusual. If it was at first often taken as a transgressive stylistic affectation, it soon became obvious it ran far deeper than that. In the mid-1990s he gave a British radio lecture called “The Flesh Made Word” as part of BBC Radio 3's religious programming, explaining how he developed an interest in religious art at art school (“largely, I think, because it irritated my instructors”) that led him deep into the Old Testament, whose stories and characters gave what he called “a nasty, new energy” to the songs he then began to write. “Floods, fire and frogs leapt out of my throat,” he explained. “Though I had no notion of that then, God was talking not just to me but through me, and His breath stank. I was a conduit for a God that spoke in a language written in bile and puke. And for a while that suited me fine.” Since then, though, he had discovered the New Testament and, it was implied, a faith that might be a little more recognizable to the average BBC listener. The lecture's last line referred back, again, to his early loss: “Like Christ, I too come in the name of my father, to keep God alive.”

Cave has since talked about a period around this time when his faith in God was at its strongest, but in a peculiar and possibly self-serving way, as these were the years when he was trying to slip his heroin addiction with, for now, only intermittent success. In a 2013 interview, he summarized the situation: “I was fucking crazy. Towards the end, I was waking up cold turkey and going to church, sick as a fucking dog. I'm sitting there sweating and listening to everything, and then trotting down…and scoring and getting back home and shooting up and going, ‘I'm living a well-rounded existence.’ ” And even though a deep interest in religious tales and ideas has clearly remained, he said that once his addiction went, so did his belief.

I would have asked him about this eventually, but I don't have to. Perhaps because he assumes, correctly, that I may be wondering, or perhaps because it's a subject that comes to the fore in times of crisis or torment or loss, in one e-mail he appends a question that I haven't asked—“something that is probably of no use what-so-ever but I'll throw it out there anyway”—and then answers it.

“Do I believe in God?” is the question. And this is what he then writes:

“As a songwriter it is important for me to have a kind of belief system that can travel and change as I see fit. Orthodoxy and atheism seem to be like battery hens, stuck in the same cage, having the same old debate. Of course, my beliefs, such as they are, cannot bear up to much scrutiny and fall apart when challenged, but that is because the debate about the existence of God seems to rest on the concept of truth. As a songwriter, I am not much interested in truth, or at least truth takes a backseat to meaning and emotional resonance; meaning, not in the sense of rational meaning, but rather, meaningfulness or value. So, when I hear a song of praise sung to a God that on any empirical level probably doesn't exist, I am somehow moved more, and filled with a deep respect for that human need for meaning that is so powerful, so desperate and so beautifully absurd.”

The next day, he writes to me again, just a paragraph, ostensibly about why we are drawn to butterflies:

“Some say why waste your time believing in God when there is so much natural beauty and awesomeness around us. Some say that there is more beauty and wonder looking at a butterfly and I agree, butterflies are beautiful things, but if you get a human being to look closely at a butterfly, to look very closely and get some more human beings to look at that butterfly so that there is a collective of people all peering intently at the butterfly they will ultimately fall to their knees and worship that butterfly. It's the way humans are put together. I don't think that makes them stupid. I think it's kind of sweet. Until someone says well my butterfly is the true butterfly and yours is not and flies a plane into the twin towers.”

One of Cave's first great songs, “The Mercy Seat,” is the testament of a man on death row who likens the electric chair to the throne of God on the Ark. Cave wrote it in 1987 while he was consumed with And the Ass Saw the Angel, writing a verse every now and then as a relief from the intensity of the novel.

Though he clearly knows it has a potency—it is the song he has played live the most times, and he has continually revisited and rearranged it—he is equivocal about its worth. “There are songs that I pretty much think are as good as I can get, and ‘The Mercy Seat’ isn't one of them,” he says. “I mean, I was surprised that people went for it the way they did.”

One of those who went for it was Johnny Cash, who covered the song on one of his late-period Rick Rubin albums. But Cash made a significant change. At the beginning of Cave's version, the man on death row describes himself, marvelously, as “nearly wholly innocent,” something that seems to prefigure the song's final lines: and anyway I told the truth / but I'm afraid I told a lie. But Cash must have seen the song differently; in his version, the prisoner describes himself as “totally innocent.”

I mention what Cash sings to Cave when we talk in Australia.

“Oh, does he?” Cave says, as though he's not really aware of this, and then says something quite mild about how he adores Cash and can imagine why he would have done this. At the time, I leave it there, but the more I think about it afterward, the more absurd it seems to me that Cave could possibly have been unaware of this change—it's discussed, for one thing, in one of the essays in the lavish and extensive new Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds box set, Lovely Creatures—and I realize that his deflection must have meant something else. So later I e-mail him to ask again.

“Well, ‘nearly wholly innocent’ is much better than ‘totally innocent,’ ” he points out. “I like the idea that the man feels he is innocent apart from the fact that he committed the crime. This is an interesting idea. ‘Totally innocent’ just means he didn't commit the crime and has been wrongfully imprisoned and hence the rest of the song doesn't really make any fucking sense. But, hey, it's Johnny Cash and I idolized the man and it was a complete honor that he sang one of my songs and it would have been simply churlish of me to quibble.”

Another way Nick Cave has kept himself busy over the years, aside from the songs and the performances and the film music and the novels and the lectures, is screenwriting. His first proper attempt, an Australian Western called The Proposition for his film-director friend John Hillcoat, was the most satisfying, but more recent experiences have been less so: “I was somehow under the impression that in Hollywood your imaginative dreams could be realized in some magical instant, which is actually just not true at all. You know, there's a gauntlet of enemies of the imagination that you have to run through, and see if you can get to the other side with some shreds of the original idea intact.” He still seems stung by the struggles and compromises involved in the last film he wrote, a Prohibition drama starring Tom Hardy called Lawless, also for Hillcoat. “That was it for me, really,” he says. “I think I can pretty much say I'm not writing another script.”

Still, one of the most improbable Nick Cave stories of all lies within his part-time scriptwriting career. At one stage Russell Crowe was keen to star in The Proposition, and so he and Cave got to know each other a little. One day Crowe called Cave up out of the blue.

“He said, ‘It's Russell here, how's the scriptwriting going?’ ” says Cave. Cave says that he replied, “I never want to write another fucking script in my life” because at that time The Proposition was going through lots of problems.

And that was when Crowe asked Cave to write Gladiator 2.

Cave was blindsided, but not so much that he failed to ask the most obvious question. “I was, ‘Didn't you die in Gladiator 1?’ ” he remembers. “And he was just like, ‘Sort it out.’ He wanted something with mythological creatures, I think set in another world—in heaven or hell, purgatory, something like that. He hadn't quite worked that part out.”

First, Cave wrote a treatment that tried to follow Crowe's instructions—“Russell confronting ogres and all this sort of shit, right?”—but that came back from Ridley Scott with big red crosses all over it, and notes that said “I do not want to make a movie like this.” Scott asked Cave to watch a lot of Bergman movies, which Cave took as a nudge toward something “kind of deep and thoughtful, and kind of existential.” Suitably re-inspired, Cave sat down to write the full script (which really was called Gladiator 2). He says now that even as he was writing it, he knew it would never get made, so he resolved to enjoy the process.

Eventually he came up with a theological story in which the gods blackmail the gladiator Maximus, who begins the movie in purgatory, to kill the followers of a new religion whose rise is making them die off—the religion turns out, of course, to be Christianity. At the same time the gladiator searches for his son. “Gets a bit fucking complicated, actually,” Cave remembers.

Along the way, he honored a very specific request from Crowe, who had told him about an unused scene written for the first movie in which the gladiator was charged by a rhinoceros. “Russell's like, ‘Just fucking imagine fucking two tons of rhino charging at me! What do I do? What do I do?’ And I'm, ‘I don't know, what do you do?’ ” But Crowe wanted his rhino. “He's like, ‘We still have the software for the rhino—put a fucking rhino in there.’ ” So Cave did.

As the film moved toward its close, he says, Maximus finds himself caught in an endless battle, turning up at the Crusades, the World Wars, Vietnam. “I thought that Ridley'd like the end, because it was like a 20-minute sequence of all-the-wars-of-history type of thing, of this unstoppable war machine,” says Cave. But the script went nowhere. “Russell didn't like it. He wanted a full-on mythological action movie, slaying dragons and sea monsters and all that sort of stuff, kind of Jason and the Argonauts and stuff like that. Ridley said that he liked it but that it would never get made.”

In the intervening years, a draft of Cave's script has leaked out, and it's a weird and remarkable feat of the imagination. At its very end, Maximus, now dressed in a black suit and wearing a tie, is seen washing his hands in a bathroom, then walking down a hallway to join a Pentagon meeting with ten other men in suits at a round table. He looks at his laptop and then says to the others: “Now, where were we?”

“It was just a completely ridiculous wigged-out thing,” says Cave, “that I had kind of fun doing.”

On February 14, 2017, Nick Cave, who very deliberately had not written a single lyric since finishing Skeleton Tree toward the end of 2015, sat down to begin work on songs for a new album. “I kind of do an enforced shutdown, confine myself to barracks for a while and confront the big hairy gogglyeyed monster head-on,” he explains. “It is anyone's guess where the lyrics might go. It is exciting because I feel full of words. And feel I have a new sort of lyrical confidence and that they really can just go anywhere.”

Cave has always been a man of disciplined work habits, and for many years he would rise each morning, put on a suit, leave his Brighton home, and go to his office, where he could sit surrounded by books and art and the other kind of ephemera that has fascinated or inspired him over the years, and try to work. (As he memorably quipped a few years back: “I used to go six days a week, till I couldn't stand it anymore. Now I go Sundays as well.'') In the months after Arthur's death, he kept trying to resume this routine. The office “became the place that sort of defined that period, those few months, a place where I'd sit and smoke and try to work and stuff.” No longer. “I just don't go in there. Not even a step.”

Nowadays, he works at home, principally on a dark-color sofa in a large second-floor bedroom at the front of the house, next to windows that look out over gardens to the sea. I visit him there toward the end of his second week of writing. He is unfailingly polite and thoughtful. He's wearing a collared shirt and what appears to be suit trousers. His sculpted hair, which he has said he has been dyeing since his teens, is the darkest of blacks, and I can't help but think of the hotel-bathroom dyeing ritual—“I carefully concoct a paste in a bowl”—described in The Sick Bag Song, the surreal epic narrative poem he wrote on tour in 2014, a sequence that includes the memorable observation: The bathroom light is brutal. / I reposition my face so that I stop looking / Like Kim Jong-un and start looking more like Johnny Cash, / Or someone. He makes tea for himself and coffee for me, and we talk.

This is life now. “I think that Susie and I both just stepped into an alternate reality, you know, but that you could slip a cigarette paper between the two worlds, both in terms of the time that it took for us to change and its closeness to reality,” he reflects. “It was just this sort of netherworld. There's definitely a kind of recognition of the life that we used to lead, and almost a shame that we could live a life, and worry about certain things that we worried about back then, that just seem absolute luxuries in this new world. You know, indulgences. And that is a big change for us. I think we are not really concerned about a lot of things that we were concerned about before, and have a much more acute fellow feeling, let's say, than I think either of us, me in particular, have ever had. I think for both of us, it has something to do with not wanting to cause any more suffering in our day-to-day lives than we possibly can. So everyone's more gentle with each other. And we're nicer people, I guess, to put it one way, I suppose. And conflict doesn't have the same sort of seductive energy that it used to.”

We spend quite a lot of the morning discussing Cave's past, and he says that people have often misunderstood the attitude with which he approaches what he does, an attitude that has never changed. Maybe people confused a darkness of taste for a nihilistic intent. Maybe it was simply the way he appeared onstage. Cave himself floats the idea that maybe it's just the way his face is, exuding a mood that isn't actually his.

“I mean, I was never a depressed person,” he says. “I've always been basically optimistic. I see great beauty in the world. You know, I look around and it's a fucking awesome beautiful place. That's how I've always felt. I'm not saying this is some kind of thing at the moment—I've always looked at the world in that way.… Writing is basically an act of love, and a kind of joyful thing to do. That quickening of the heart that comes when you're onto something. I mean, I get all kind of shaky and stuff like that. It's an immensely positive act, nothing to do with sadness or depression or any of these sorts of things, no matter what you're writing about.”

Many years ago, Nick Cave had the notion to erect a large bronze statue of himself in the small Australian country town of Warracknabeal, where he was born. At the time, the idea was some combination of conceptual art prank, odd film project, and deliberate folly, because, of course, there was no fervent groundswell of popular opinion that this should happen. “There was a kind of perverse allure to the whole thing,” he says, “of having a statue in a town where everyone was, ‘Who the fuck is this guy?’ The idea was to make the statue, have it rejected by the town, and dump it in the desert—this Planet of the Apes type of scenario, the desert eventually swallowing it up.”

Ironically, things have turned around. More recently, he says, the town has been getting in touch, apparently interested in reviving the idea, and this clearly makes Cave feel a little awkward. “The more I deserve the statue,” he says, “the less interesting it is for me.”

But, to be clear, this isn't some theoretical Nick Cave statue whose details would be pinned down at a later date. The design exists, and when I mention this scheme, he leaves the room and returns with the prototype of the bronze sculpture. It shows Cave, with long hair and wearing nothing but a loincloth, heroically posed on a rearing stallion, his left arm brandishing what Cave describes as “this sort of eternal flame.”

He places it on the mantelpiece, next to a statue of Jesus, also wearing nothing but a kind of loincloth, his slipping down off his waist in a weirdly sexual way. The near-naked twosome remain there, just above us, as we talk.

After a while we break and head out for some lunch from a café around the corner. Cave has lived in Brighton for 15 years, and he says that it has been a wonderful place to be, but this period of his life is drawing to a close. “Mostly, we just find it too difficult to live here,” he says. The plan is to move to Los Angeles. The family spent some time there last year, and it felt like the kind of blank slate they need.

“I don't know how to say this really,” he says. “Everyone here has just been so great, and that's in a way half the problem. When I go out in Brighton these days, there's a sort of feeling that we're all in this together. And it's just a little bit too intense for me. It's too many memories, really. We've really tried. But it's just beyond us, in a way, to remain.”

In an essay and lecture that Nick Cave, who is now 59, wrote when he was in his early 40s, titled “The Secret Life of the Love Song,” he quoted the poet W. H. Auden: “The so-called traumatic experience is not an accident, but the opportunity for which the child has been patiently waiting—had it not occurred, it would have found another—in order that its life become a serious matter.” And, back then, Cave himself wrote:

Looking back over the last twenty years, a certain clarity prevails. Amidst the madness and the mayhem, it would seem I have been banging on one particular drum. I see that my artistic life has centred around an attempt to articulate an almost palpable sense of loss which laid claim to my life. A great gaping hole was blasted out of my world by the unexpected death of my father.... The way I learned to fill this hole, this void, was to write.

Recently, Nick Cave has been thinking about that Auden quote again, and he says that he has reconsidered.

“I always thought the traumatic incident was the death of my father,” he says, “but actually I don't think the traumatic experience had actually happened. It was waiting.”

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